This week my internet at home is noticeably slow. How do I test it to see what the speed is? What other things should I check out? I swear it was fine last week. Nothing should be different this week. Thanks!

Go to speedtest.net, they have a little flash widget on their site that will test both your upload and downloads speed. If you want to test the speed on a mobile device, you can download the speedtest.net application from your mobile app-store, if not, just hit the speedtest.net site on a browser.

Warning: The site is going to spam with with ads try to sell you software to 'clean' your PC. That software is bullshit, use the free service and get out of dodge.

"Nice and quirky. Like the lyrics, but Is this arty enough for Songfight?" --Spud

Keep in mind that Speedtest.net is provided by cable companies and provides the absolute fastest detected results in order to make said cable companies look good. It is not a good indicator of actual transfer speeds, but it is handy and HTML5 so it works on mobile devices as Chumpy said.

When I feel the home speeds sagging I do a complete shutdown of all the related internet boxes (cable, network breakout box, router, switch, etc.) wait a minute (to drain capacitors) then switch them all on again. Often this will fix whatever was choking bandwidth.

I'm not sure if it's still this way, but, it used to be that you'd be paying for "25Mbps 'peak'" speed, meaning that you are paying for the possibility of peak download speeds of 25Mbps, but your normal average downloads speeds will generally be much lower. Also it used to be that you'd be paying for 25Mbps downstream but much less upstream.

You're probably having a problem of some kind though as I just got 20/5 on my DSL and your cable internet should be faster than that. :/ One more thing to check is to try speedtest.net again but do it from a computer plugged in to your router or cable model, to try to eliminate your Wifi network as a source of the slowdown.

roymond wrote:Keep in mind that Speedtest.net is provided by cable companies and provides the absolute fastest detected results in order to make said cable companies look good. It is not a good indicator of actual transfer speeds, but it is handy and HTML5 so it works on mobile devices as Chumpy said.

I'm afraid this isn't entirely accurate. Speedtest.net is owned and operated by a company called Ookla. Ookla partners with various ISPs, including cable companies, who provide endpoints for the bandwidth test. The speedtest widget will pick a random endpoint near you, which may indeed be hosted by your ISP, but isn't always. The widget that performs the test on the speedtest.net page is implemented using Flash, and not HTML5, so it won't work on mobile browsers that do not support Flash, which is why I suggested downloading the app on mobile. There are a number of reasons why results on speedtest.net may differ from real world performance, but in the context of this discussion they are largely irrelevant.

"Nice and quirky. Like the lyrics, but Is this arty enough for Songfight?" --Spud

Chumpy wrote:I'm afraid this isn't entirely accurate. Speedtest.net is owned and operated by a company called Ookla. Ookla partners with various ISPs, including cable companies, who provide endpoints for the bandwidth test.

Oh yeah, speedof.me is the html5 test. I stand corrected. My concern with these tests, though, are that they use averages that often don't reflect real world usage. Of course they have to do this as they can't predict what we're looking for, be it light web browsing or heavy downloads/uploads and speedtest has modified its methods over the years to better assess things. I'm often moving very large files and clients running a simple speedtest have difficulty comparing results with even a 2GB download. Main point being: take it for what it is. Secondary point being: don't listen to me again.

Thanks for all your help. The kale thing seems to really be working. Unfortunately, it seems that my wireless router is not. The modem is fine, and if I connect my computer via ethernet, everything is fine. However, no matter how many times I unplug it and plug it back in, it won't show up as a network. The lights are on, but it seems like no one is home. Any suggestions on a replacement? I don't know much about these things and a friend set this whole thing up years ago.

In case anyone is interested, I just replaced my old modem and wireless router with a combo deal: NETGEAR N600 Wi-Fi DOCSIS 3.0 Cable Modem Router (C3700) on Amazon for $99. It was easy to install, and despite having to register it with my Cable company (Comcast), it has been a simple process and seems to be so much faster.